The Jeffrey Epstein saga has been dissected in endless media cycles, congressional hearings, and cable news panels. Every week, another high-profile name is dragged into the story. Prince Andrew is questioned. Bill Gates is scrutinized. Headlines scream moral outrage. Yet all of this, despite the lurid details, barely scratches the surface of the problem. Epstein was a facilitator for the ruling class, arranging access and opportunities for those who could afford it. His crimes were real, but the fixation on his persona and those connected to him serves primarily as a distraction. The Epstein file confirms what society already knows: the wealthy and powerful operate above the law, and the structures that enable their immunity remain intact. This is not about individual villainy. It is about systemic corruption, institutional protection for privilege, and the performative outrage that keeps ordinary people distracted.
Epstein was a sex offender, and the harms he inflicted on vulnerable young women are documented. The term “pedophile” is often applied inaccurately; he preyed on teenagers and young adults, not prepubescent children. Precision matters because exaggeration creates a moral spectacle, a simplification that allows the media to craft heroes and villains without addressing the systemic mechanisms that facilitated abuse. Epstein was likely a Mossad asset, operating with tacit intelligence tolerance rather than as a Russian operative. His role was to serve the elite, to arrange access for those with wealth and influence, and to ensure that the system’s hierarchy remained unchallenged.
Faux Villains and Public Distraction
The treatment of Epstein by the media has produced a pantheon of faux villains. Prince Andrew is depicted as decadent and corrupt, Bill Gates as a morally compromised technocrat, and Epstein himself as a monstrous genius. This is modern-day moral theater, a kind of ritualized public shaming akin to the Salem Witch trials. Society consumes outrage as entertainment, reveling in the symbolic punishment of figures who, in the broader sense, are incidental to the system that enabled them. The headlines scream moral indignation, but the underlying structures remain unexamined and unchanged.
The obsessive focus on sensationalized personalities obscures the real enablers: legal loopholes, offshore finances, political connections, and networks of influence that operate above scrutiny. Media narratives present nearly every transactional sexual encounter as trafficking, often without examining the legal status or consent of the individuals involved. A twenty-two-year-old woman receiving ten thousand dollars for a lap dance is framed as a victim of trafficking. Yet society simultaneously celebrates OnlyFans () performers and adult entertainment as empowered labor. This glaring hypocrisy demonstrates that outrage is selective, designed to target some and protect others. Symbolic outrage against Epstein and his associates reinforces the idea that the system works, while in reality, elite networks continue as normal, shielded by wealth, influence, and privilege.
This spectacle of villains is comforting because it allows society to externalize blame onto individuals. We can point fingers at Andrew or Gates, sigh in moral satisfaction, and feel that justice is being served. Meanwhile, the mechanisms that allowed Epstein’s operations to thrive—the institutional protection of the elite, the political tolerance of misconduct, the financial instruments that conceal wrongdoing—remain intact. The moral theater pacifies public anger while leaving structural inequities untouched. Real accountability, the kind that challenges elite power, requires targeting systems, not individuals.
Language, Systemic Failure, and the Need to Resist
The repeated mislabeling of Epstein as a pedophile and the sensationalist language around “trafficking” obscures the true lesson. He was a sex offender, a facilitator of abuse, and a functionary for the elite, likely operating with intelligence knowledge. Focusing on labels and individual actors, rather than the networks and systems they serve, reduces public engagement to moral posturing. Symbolic justice, like publicly questioning high-profile associates, does not threaten the elite networks or disrupt their protection structures.
This is why a truly left-wing perspective requires looking beyond the individuals. Epstein’s notoriety should not distract from the ruling class and the mechanisms they employ to remain unaccountable. It should not distract from the offshore financial networks, political alliances, and institutional complicity that enable exploitation and inequality. Public outrage is meaningless if it remains performative, confined to the pantomime of individual blame. To achieve real change, ordinary people must recognize that the system itself—the hierarchy, the protective legal and financial frameworks, the tolerance of wealth and privilege—is the problem.
Standing up against this system is not about moral gestures or consuming media spectacles. It requires organized resistance, demands for structural accountability, and a refusal to accept symbolic villains as substitutes for real justice. Wealth and power are not exceptions; they are the engines of systemic inequality. Until society challenges these engines, the abuses facilitated by individuals like Epstein will continue, regardless of who is publicly shamed. Public outrage must become action against the system itself: pushing for financial transparency, legal reforms, and political accountability that threatens elite impunity rather than merely exposing the pawns of the hierarchy.
The Epstein saga is therefore less a story about an individual’s depravity than a mirror reflecting the operations of modern power. The spectacle, the outrage, the repeated framing of minor figures—all of it functions to reassure society that wrongdoing is being addressed. In reality, the ruling class continues undisturbed. Epstein was a facilitator and an intelligence-linked asset, a conduit through which the elite could operate with impunity. The focus on him, or on Prince Andrew or Bill Gates, is distraction. The true issue lies in confronting the systems of privilege, influence, and structural protection that remain untouched.
Only by directing attention to these systemic failures can society hope to prevent future abuses. The outrage and moral theater that dominate headlines serve the elite; they comfort the public without challenging entrenched power. Real change demands that people stand up not to symbolic villains but to the system itself. Until that happens, the structures that allowed Epstein to thrive will persist, and the performance of outrage will continue to substitute for actual accountability.